Westfield
by Invariant
Summary: Two missing scenes from 'Welcome to Westfield'. Olivia's new identity dealing with Peter's effect on her.


**Disclaimer: Don't own these amazing characters. I just like to play with them. **

**This was written in a day. I was trying to get it uploaded before this Friday, but unfortunately, I didn't make my own deadline. Anyways, this is a lil missing scene from my favorite episode of the season so far. I wanted to delve deeper into what was going on with Olivia in 'Welcome to Westfield'. At the time this was completed, I hadn't yet seen the newest eppy.**

**The first part takes place during the commercial break, depicting what could have happened once our clan got off the roof of the highschool. Part two takes place after Olivia talks to Cliff towards the end of the episode. **

**The Pea-coat reference is an ode to how popular this particular piece of Peter's attire is. Apparently there's been a few thread topics, and a video clip dedicated to it. Can't deny I like looking at him in it too. ;)**

**Again, reviews are like candy, and I'd ask that you keep in mind this is the product of a lil sleep and too much muse. There are no words to describe how much I love this show! **

**This is dedicated to my avid readers. ****Please enjoy, my lovelies!**

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><p>There was a time a wall could hold her, brace her, remind her that strength is erected through the brimstone self-conduct she carries through every facet of her job.<p>

It would seem though, that with the absence of her once-steeled interior, the sturdy, concrete support of this gymnasiam is doing absolutely nothing to aid her.

It's merely hard on her back, pressing into her spine till her vertebre cringe from the obtrusion. And to be honest, at this moment, it's a welcome pain, a necessary distracton from their present crisis, and the shock of her hot, frenzied synapsis, the one's shot to overdrive the moment she'd woke from a phone call this morning.

It'd been his voice on the other end, Peter's, the same dropped-here-from-timbuktu once-stranger, who'd, just seconds before, invaded her subconscious with an unexpectedly vivd renidition of coital gratification. In the dark of her dream-state bedroom, he'd vindicated his hold on her, a slate fire blazing through cerulean to clutch her soul, his eyes mirroring his words of 'I love you'.

And it had felt too pressingly familiar, too strangely realistic in the after-glow of her waking world, less of a dream, more of a forgotten experience in a far away memory.

An abandoned conciousness existing in the recess of her mind.

Not possible, she knows, but she can't shake away the picture-esque details.

And when she arrived at the lab this morning, to his bidding, it drove her neurons mad with a rapid-fire frustration. Somehow, he'd felt different, as though the mere air around him was spiking her own, lighting her blood, spiraling her brain and everything downward out of control.

Every part of her intricate make-up called out for his skin.

This wasn't a routine reaction to a sex-fueled dream, it was more, not a whisp derived of fantasy, but a punch somehow of what is, a strange force of something undellible, scorching her flesh with the all-too real feel of his hot fingerprints.

None of it felt conjured from a sleep state, but emerged somehow, from the same lived existence tucked inside her subconscious.

There are two sides of a line, and there were moments today, when she didn't know either, disoriented from a mania that leaves her grapsing at straws.

And in those seconds, she merely is, existing on the other end of his ruthless gravity.

And as she stands here now, she watches him, peering out the window, bathed in the grey light breaking from the out-there chaos. He's worrying his lip in a deep concentration, scored from the beautiful crease of his brow in the lighted cesious of his private cogitation, a bluish-grey propulsion of his postulating genius. He's tucked the shot- gun under his arm, and for an instant, she expects the ready stance she's learned him by, a spry bracing of his body in the wild, ready retreat of a trapped animal.

But something's different here this time, he doesn't have one foot forward, he doesn't seem as anxious to run from this un-willing confinement he's been handed, instead, he's grounded, steadied by what feels like the same invisible force that pulls on the inside of her wrists.

For the first time, he seems oddly established in the face of a mis-placed timeline.

If she didn't somehow know better, she'd blame these massive differences on this peculiar town and the whirl-wind hysteria of it's aggresive phenomenon.

She points to, instead, the lingering sense of an intimacy not quite hers, and not quite anyone else's, the same overwhelming appreciation that made her state earlier, her gratitude of how he is in the secret of her racing pulse.

Or maybe he fits here now, because she's losing all true sense of her mental footing.

But to her surprise, for some reason, she doesn't feel terrified at all by what it could mean.

Carefully, he backs away from the window, relinquishing his thoughts to the abandoned hypothosis that made him move. And now, for some reason, she wonders, absently, why the vision feels so familar, why somewhere he tenses his arms on the ledge of a table she doesn't recognize, shakes his head from another unsolvable quandry she can't quite remember.

And now his peacoat, too, the one he's tucking shotgun shells into, she sees it in the corner of her bedroom floor, thrown haphazardly under her blouse and his jeans.

This makes her rub her eyes, her fingers trying to dig away somehow the foreign deja vu, trying to burrow out an occular memory she never had.

Burrow; like his hand burrows into her back muscles, as their sitting on his couch and he thinks he's drawing lazy circles, but she doesn't like it, and for some reason she just wants to laugh, and this isn't right, because this isn't real.

And there's a noxious stimuli, on the heels of this, an instant surge of molar-clashing pain banded from behind her eyes to the back of her skull. And it makes her cringe, dig her fingernails into the cold plaster of the wall in the breath-ripping backlash of such a swift blow.

It's throbbing now, filling her ears with a pressure that pulls on her temples, tightens her maxillae, arrests her in a quick sensitivity to light and sound and physical coherency.

Oh god, not here, she didn't need this now, she didn't need a migraine attack here, of all places smack dab in the middle of their impending death.

She digs her toes in her boots, trying to recognize something she can tether her violated body to, and she strains her ribs for needed air, trying to find breath in the tomult of her affliction. And through it all, she recognizes somehow that he's there, infront of her, with one hand on her shoulder and the other burning into the side of her neck.

She hears her name, somehow, she hears her name, and instantly, like knuckles in the heat of a fist fight, the pain snaps back, leaving her waning from disconnection in the makes of a fresh neurological bruise.

"Hey." his voice says to her, in a tone as concerned as the pale azure of his eyes that call her to focus, "You're not okay."

It takes her a moment, to register his words, to blink again on a reality where she can feel the weight of her jacket on her shoulders, in the aftermath of a forgotten subsistence.

And she ducks her head, embarassed, finding balance again at the feet of her confusion.

In front of and around them, she hears hushed voices, rustling blankets, the footprints and quiet fears that fill their make-shift isolation quarters, that inhabit this abandoned gym with the brave and the few.

To the sides of her, were stranded soliders on the front lines of a losing warfare. For them, she has to do her best to stay centered, oriented.

Right now, couldn't be about her.

"No, I-I am." she says, throwing her hands up in defense. "I'm good-I just, It's a migraine that's all."

He studies her, and she feels a blush creep from the nape of her neck to her cheeks.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah." she lies, trying to stand taller under his hoovering height. "I'm okay, really. You heard Walter before, I'm fine."

He frowns, skeptical, and as hard as she could try to perusade him, she knows somehow she can't snow him into believing what she's not convinced of either. Something is happening to her, and if not caused by this peril, then brought on by something else.

No sane person lives on the precipeice of insanity.

For a moment she thinks he'll question her again, pry out of her some answer she has no idea how to find, but instead, he tells her to wait a sec, holds up his hand in a gesture that tells her to stay put.

It's a non-issue still, as she ducks her heavy head, slowly overcoming the brunt of her molestation.

"Here." he says, returning, and she looks up.

In his right palm he shakes two pills from an Aspirin bottle, the generic kind found in emergency first aid kits. It most have came from the one they nabbed at the sheriff's office.

"Sorry it's not pharmacy grade." he tells her, when he hands her the pills. "I didn't have time to run to the store."

Like a boy's, his eyes sparkle, a cloudy-blue twinkle of amusement on the tails of his own humor. And it makes her feel solid now, present, no longer attuned to the rip-roar in her head.

And like his, her mouth curves, a welcome second of relief amidst air thickened by disaster, flooded by her personal, uproarious upheaveal.

Out of nowhere he gives her bottled water, and she takes it too, swallows the pills down, trying not to feel the shadow of a cranial-deep ache.

"Thank you."

She says finally, when she's recapped the plastic lid, and he nods, says your welcome. And his genuine compassion ignites something warm in the hollow of her chest.

"You know you're pretty good at this. Looking out for me."

She feeds him a knowing smile, and he takes it in stride.

"It's habit by now." he says with no more explanation then a dark blue that shades heather, a sadness, once profound, now sly, that slips in and out of his pupils with thoughts of the her he calls home. It's unrecognizable to the unknowing, his smile lessening anymore the weight of his intent and direction.

But she sees it, and she feels it. Because he'll never accept his integration here, with them, as anything more then a drawn-out stint.

And to the concious parts of her familiar mind, that's too painful a heartache to fathom right now.

"Well, some habits are great ones."

She assures him, with the kind of smile she whips out before devestating thoughts can undo her completely.

In response, he nods, obviously flattered through the flush of his cheeks.

And somehow, right now, she's too dangerously captivated by how close to her he really is.

Another foot and she'd have no personal space, and it's not an uncomfortable thought, but a titilating one, exciting her skin in the same way it had in the biology lab, when she stood inches before him, hearing him define the her of his world with words of affection.

Somehow, she'd been both emersed and devestated from them, both questioning differences and hearing vivications, as if she couldn't quite decide to be heart-stricken or beguiled by him.

It sounds crazy now, to say it feels as though a second skin crawls under hers, a duplication of her own that's lived a seperate life.

As though she knows somehow, that his gene-specific attraction called it here to her, that the visions she has aren't derailed fantasies but a type of past-life that's hid itself in her mind.

In those seconds, in the haze of a battling coherency, she's balanced on the edge of two different worlds.

And it's aboslutely ridiculous, because what's real is that she's never been to Edina or cleaned his clothes off her floor, and they're stuck in a standstill in this gym in the middle of a delapitating town.

And they have to get out.

For the first time, since she took shelter near this wall, she's summoned back into the wrath of their sensitive quandry.

She looks at her watch, clocks the time, notes that it's been ten point five minutes since Walter asked that he have five alone.

"We're going to be okay." she hears him say, and when she looks at him, she wants desperately to feel the hope written in the beautiful etch of his face. "We're going to make it out of this."

It's so fluid, the way he says it, liquid almost with a second nature that comes with years at the helm of such a dilemma. Even if he doubts, he hides them away for the sake of her quiet panic. This isn't the first time he's consoled a her this way.

"You've said that a few times before, haven't you?"

She questions, sivering away the ghost of his arms around her, a hug given somewhere to warm the cold of her fear in a place she can't see.

She pretends not to feel it.

"Once or twice."

He answers, with an almost proud smile and she returns it.

If not for him, she'd be worried still, that it was this town that had tainted her, inflicted her with the horrible infirmity it struck on it's people. She'd have kept the fear to herself, not wanting to loose her false sense of confidence in the face of searching eyes.

But right now, somehow, he's making her realize she's not as insurmountabe as she wants to believe. And somehow, he's the only one who'll ever know it.

"You know, I was so scared Peter, that whatever was happening here was affecting me." she admits, suddenly comfortable enough in his air to admit such an exposure. "It almost felt like Vitas Petrol all over again."

This makes her lean back, brace her weight against the wall again from the flittering memories of another fought fate, a barely won war against a thousands year old organism that fought their health for it's survival.

"Vitas Petrol?"

He questions, as though he dosn't understand, and she can't comprehend at all, how he could forget such an impact.

"Yeah, you remember," she shifts to face him, throws her hand in the air. "It was the company on the sixteenth floor where that virus originated." his frown deepens. "The outbreak case we worked a year ago."

"What?"

His voice is softer now, his eyes deepened to ultramarine under the duress of her words, as though she's blind-sided him somehow with her imagination. And because it can't be possible that he's clueless, she presses on.

"We were isolated, and you'd gotten the blood on you and you-you were infected." she still sees it, him scrubbing the red stains from his forarms, his violent, rage against a glass door as the virus begs to be set free, let loose. "Peter, you can't tell me you don't remember-"

He cuts her off with a wave of his hand, stands taller infront of her, and somehow, she feels his body tense, coil from some private stress.

"No, Olivia, trust me. I remember." he tells her, carefully, "But you weren't there. I was there, with my Olivia."

This is punctuated by another searing in her skull, another brutal attack on her neuro-pathways, and again, it's teeth grinding, culminating into a dizzy spell that kicks at her lucidness.

And after the pain, after she's fisted her hands to pale knuckles, comes inteligibility, grounding her again in a scrutable actuality where she's no idea why she's just said what she's said.

But there's a cautioned curiousity in the form of his brows, contrasting what looks like shock fighting confusion in the sea-foam hue of his stare.

And suddenly she feels remarkably embarrassed, self-concious for the reason that this isn't how she was. Nonsensical isn't supposed to be a word that describes her.

"God, Peter, I'm, I'm sorry, I don't know what-I don't know what I'm saying." she admits, a little flitter of panic stinging under her sternum. "I'm just-getting confused I guess. I haven't been sleeping well lately."

For right now, it's the best excuse she has, relying on the side-effects of insomnia to explain her hallucinations.

"And with the effects of the migraines, I guess that I'm- I'm having a difficult time distinguishing... some things, that's all."

She wants him to accept this but his frown only gets deeper.

"Olivia, there's no way-"

Before he can finish, he's cut off by Walter's cry of frustration, the first audible sound from the professer since he took to his thinking.

"Dammit, I don't know what to do-, I can't seem to process a solution."

This turns their attention to the center of the gym, and with a look of utter disapointment, a trembling aggravation in the twitch of his hands, the elder Bishop begins pacing.

And whatever optimism she'd gained from Peter's consoling words before, are flickering out with the good doctor's depressing mood.

"He's going to have to think of something." she says to Peter, for her own's sake. "I'm going to go talk to him. We're running out of time."

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><p>There's hardly anything left, in the aftermath of a small town's destruction. Dust, debris and degregation have swallowed all the places where a municipality once stood.<p>

Except for the shop behind her, the one where they took shelter, the Noahs Ark of another flood they've managed to cheat their way out of. They'd all ran here, through the whirl-wind of ruin, after Peter had snapped Walter back from the grey of a hoplessness that promised their demise. Together the two concluded that it was here they'd be safe, here where they'd survive, at the corner of Cyprus and Quimby huddled among moutain bikes and air pumps in the eye of the storm.

And they'd been right, because here she is, alive, taking in the scene with the routine sense of relief that they've all just defied death and it's twisting little fingers.

The rescue team is slowly despersing now, following Broyle's leave, packing up thier firetrucks and ambulances to leave tire-treads in what's left of Westfield Vermont.

One day one man decided to play God, leaving in his menacing wake devices of amphilicyte that destroyed a populous. The why escapes them all, but tomorrow will speak for itself, demanding swift justice and answers in the bonds of David Robert Jones.

So for now, she's resided to take this in, this moment of solace after another averted crisis.

The air burns a little, when she breathes deep, singes her nostrils with the fumes of smoldering ash in late-winter. And it sets off again, a minute ache, a pain that starts between her eyes to permeate through the thinkness of her skull. But she doesn't give in to it this time, instead she bites it back, because she sees her blood's excitement, leaning against their SUV, patiently waiting for Walter who's conversing with a few of the surviving town folk, obviously knee deep in a story with animated hand gestures.

She nears Peter and he looks up, smiles at her, lighting his face with the same relief she feels, his features bright and stark against the exhaustion that's slackened his posture.

God, she was tired too.

"Hey." she says, as she comes to stand beside him, her feet between asphalt and what was once a sidewalk . "You were right, we made it out."

The smile widens, letting his eyes fall directly on her, an argent pale blue in the grey light of early evening.

"Is this the part where I say 'I told you so?"

Lost somehow through her numb headache, he's looking at her this same way outside of her apartment building, leaning not against her car but the brick foundation. And she pulls him in and upstairs, where they spend the night in each other because they crave and they need.

And after it leaves her lightheaded, she shakes off the vision.

"Well, I owe it to you." she says, after it clears completely. Then she throws a hand in the air, points toward his make-shift father. "If you didn't have a way of focusing him, and if-if he wasn't so receptive toward your theory, I don't know that we'd be standing here alive."

With a cross between a breath and skeptical laugh, Peter shifts his weight beside her, crosses his arms as he lowers his eyes to the ground, in part desbeliving and in part, completely flattered.

"He'd have figured it out eventually."

He says, his stare now finding Walter.

"Either way, I meant what I said before." she responds, following his line of vision. "You're good for him."

The words are soft, swelling under her upper-ribs, veining out into her chest with a warmth that reaches her fingertips. And when he peers at her now, a beautiful grey cerulean under thick lashes, that warmth ignites to a heat that ceases her body over, excites it with the same desire that transpired her dream, that somehow carries her conscious to a place she knows in full detail, and yet not at all.

"I've had alot of practice."

He responds, his up-turned mouth deepening the smile lines book-ending what entraps her.

"You're good for me too."

She tells him, that heat growing too strong, almost familiarly, and it makes her feel suffocated in her hat and gloves and clothes, makes her want to strip them off until her body can breathe again, until it can feel the salt of his skin on hers and know again what content is.

This makes her swallow, hard, fortress back the faraway scene of a night not in her bed, but his, in a room she's never been filled with things she's somehow seen.

And he's looking at her now with a hint of the same misery as before, concealed behind the tone of their converation, as though he's not quite sure what to say in the private battle behind a sternly sad blue. So as he always does, he blinks it away with the facade of his humor.

"Wow." he says softly, looking down again and back up, anywhere but at her. "I'm scoring alot of points today."

"You deserve them."

In some other world, he would have thanked her for the compliment, but now, it's only a memory of something lost, a painful reminder that in a different universe, she's right. The greatest thing about them there, is a matured connection, the one she somehow knows is defining every timeline to cause the rauckus in her head.

It's the same one that forces her different, empathetic to the memories of a love that goads on her helplessness in front of him. In a way she doesn't understand, she's completely waylaid, and yet utterly driven by her erratic pulse, her tingling flesh in the confines of the air that he's breathing.

She doesn't know how, but standing here beside him, in the debris of a broken city in the aftermath of fought crisis, she knows there's ten degrees to the eight-million ways she's in love with him.

And she's finding it hard not to admit she's never liked a feeling more.

"Thanks." he finally says, because regardless of any kicked-up desparity, he is, truly, grateful for her appreciation.

For a few seconds more, he can't take his eyes from the toe of his shoe, lost in a private battle between then and now, a memory playing in his mind whose white flag he's persuading be thrown to this reality.

And it's after Walter's cry of delight, that he's victorious, brought back to this world as soon as he hears his sub-father's voice in the excited tone of mid-conversation. He clears his throat, exhales deep, and she lets him have it, this quiet moment of realizing again that this is the life he has to live right now.

She wants to leave him be as much as she wants to pull him into her and say it's going to be okay, because she's right here, and she loves him.

"You know, it could have been worse." He says, his voice light now, his new mood the spoils of his won battle.

"How?"

She asks, and when his eyes turn to her, she sees the same twinkle as before in the gymnasium, after he handed her the pills with an amusing delivery.

"There could have been zombies."

She laughs at this, feeling again not his austerity, but the relief of lived-through grand dissary. And again, there's a shockwave in the back of her skull, a reel of horrors and evils fought by his side that play against her mind's eye to fall out into a haze.

It reminds her of a different kind of monstrosity. The one he saved her from their second year together.

"Or a Scorpian baby."

She says, amused with herself, but he's not as impressed, instead, he looks at her the same way he did in the gym, confused and mystified, that deep etch between his brows shading his eyes with a perse disbelief. But there's something else, in this way he's searching her, as though there's something waiting to be grasped in his grey-blue sensory that he's struggling to accept, to make sense of. And it makes him stand straighter, taut with some personal distress she can't read on his face, the planes and archs jumbled by what's becoming a mental exhaustion.

Before she can question it this time, Walter appears, standing before them with the same sparkle in his eyes she's seen on a much younger Bishop. Walter looks to the same man.

"Peter! Oh Peter, Mr, Maurede just advised me of a superb place that serves Strawberry Milkshakes." He's shaking now, with the excitment reserved for a kid in a candy store. "Apparently it falls along our destination home, just along the highway."

Walter ducks his head closer to him, as though he's about to reveal a secret in the midst of prying ears.

"Now, I don't know about you, but I could go for some ice cream."

With this, the good Doctor puts his hands to his mouth, jumps on his toes with the anxiousness of a child at Christmas. And in a matter of seconds, he's seated himself in the car, ready for the journey.

This is what makes Peter laugh, shake his head and with it, whatever stress bogged him down at the feet of her words. He drops his hands, raises a brow and when he looks at her, the flicker in his eye is the one she'd just seen.

"If the next town has Aliens, you're on your own."

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><p><strong>Don't know if this could be considered cannon or not given the following episode, but I'd like to think I didn't stray too far from how it could have played out. Again, I LOVE reviews. They feed my muse!<strong>


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